We can begin measuring the distance Stephen and his creator travel away
from aestheticism by comparing the central character of Stephen Hero, called
Stephen Daedalus, with Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Near the end of what
has survived of Stephen Hero, Stephen claims that one function of writing
is ‘to record . . . epiphanies’, ‘the most delicate and evanescent of moments’
(SH 216/211). By epiphany he means ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation,
whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase
of the mind itself’. Stephen’s interest in writing evocative prose vignettes, of
the sort Joyce himself wrote, is aesthetic, but ‘vulgarity’ invites a realistic
style. Joyce moved beyond Pater’s influence when he produced the realism
of Dubliners (written 1904–7), which is antithetical to Pater’s lush, late-
Romantic writing. Stephen has yet to take that step in A Portrait, where he
thinks admiringly in part iv of ‘a lucid supple periodic prose’ (P 140) that
derives from Pater. His thoughts include a diction of ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trembling’
(P 145) that also evokes Pater. The continuing or lingering influence
of aestheticism on Stephen Daedalus and his counterpart in A Portrait and
Ulysses complicates the impression that he may be moving toward the kind
of writing that Joyce himself produced.
The evidence concerning Stephen’s artistic potential, including his readiness
to face and affect historical realities, is mixed, and the problem of judging
him is difficult for several reasons.7 Prior to Ulysses, we may be dealing
with two characters, both named Stephen, about whom different judgements
can be made, since the narratives of Stephen Hero and A Portrait differ in
more significant ways than the spelling of the character’s surname. Although
these characters resemble each other, only provisional identification is warranted.
Later, in Ulysses, Stephen’s experiences and views from A Portrait
carry over but not with any great force or frequency. Joyce complicates our
response to the artist character(s) by assigning many details from his own life
to Stephen. In his own publishing career, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Stephen
Daedalus’ (JJ 164) when he published early versions of three Dubliners stories.
Joyce’s frequent intimate renderings of Stephen’s thinking in A Portrait
and Ulysses further contribute to blurring the boundary between narrator
and character, despite the third-person narration. Since Joyce is writing fiction
and not pure autobiography, it is important not to identify the real
author in any absolute way with the young artist character; nevertheless, the
texts frequently encourage us to consider the alignment.
In presenting Stephen prior to Ulysses, Joyce employs the two epiphanic
modes of stark realism – ‘the vulgarity of speech or of gesture’ – and visionary
fantasy – ‘a memorable phase of the mind itself’ – as delimiting extremes in his
character. In both Stephen Hero and A Portrait, Stephen alternates between
visionary and material, internal and external. He continues to feel attracted
by visionary possibilities until the end of A Portrait and is influenced by
them when he writes both his villanelle and his journal. But the evocations of
Stephen’s competing allegiances differ substantially in the two narratives that
focus primarily on him. In Stephen Hero Stephen is both ruthlessly analytical
and visionary.At a crucial moment in his development, his encounter with the
disturbing reality of death intensifies both his critical bent and his visionary
yearnings. In A Portrait, by contrast, Joyce presents the two perspectives of
realism and fantasy not primarily as aspects of character but fundamentally
as aspects of style. Having emerged as mutually modifying and mutually
challenging attitudes, these styles of Stephen’s thinking overlap and evoke
each other. In A Portrait realistic and visionary are complexly intertwined
elements in a style emphasizing memory. The double temporal orientation
points toward Joyce’s more allusive initial style in Ulysses.
Memory is not just personal inAPortrait and Ulysses. It is also cultural and
historical. Joyce’s writings recognize equally the cultural memory of myth
and the historical realities of contemporary life, as well as the process by
which those present realities have come into being. One of Joyce’s achievements
that eludes Stephen even in Ulysses is the merging of these kinds of
memory in styles that also acknowledge the personal and the aesthetic. In
Ulysses Stephen says that he is ‘trying to awake’ from the nightmare that
is history (U 3.377). Instead of treating history as a bad dream from which
we might wake up and escape, Joyce engages with history, using a realistic
style strategically in a mixture of styles that interprets and transforms history
and realistic detail by merging them with myth. When Joyce attributes
mythic aspects to characters in styles that both recognize and challenge the
ostensible limits of realism and history, he actualizes a potential that Stephen
has yet to grasp. In his dialogue on art, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Wilde
has Gilbert say that ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.’8 Joyce
accepts this duty but understands that when we make history we cannot
do so just as we please. By calling his artist character ‘Dedalus’, a name
simultaneously passed on from Stephen’s Irish father and bestowed by the
Irish writer of the narrative, Joyce realizes a cultural memory that invites a
forward direction toward what ‘has not yet come into the world’ (P 212).
Dedalus is simultaneously the artist character’s heritage and a name that he
can live up to only by influencing the history of the future. In A Portrait, it
is not obvious that Stephen is ready to take a step that neither repeats the
past nor escapes from history. The dates at the close of the book, 1904 and
1914, however, point forward from the narrative’s end to a future a decade
later in which Stephen is more likely to take such a step.
In Ulysses Stephen remembers his former commitment to an art that captures
spiritual manifestations and transcends history. During the recollection,
which occurs in the third episode, Stephen is again on the beach and
may remember his former allegiance to a spiritual, Paterian notion of art
because the surroundings remind him of the earlier beach scene reported
in A Portrait. An important event has intervened between these two scenes.
Stephen’s mother has died during the unnarrated period following the end
of A Portrait and preceding the beginning of Ulysses. During the day of
Ulysses, the fact of her death almost exactly one year earlier is the often
unstated background for Stephen’s thinking, including this memory. Joyce
turns to an encounter with death, like the one involving Stephen’s sister in
Stephen Hero, as he composes an alternative for both realism and fantasy.
Those earlier styles are being complicated and displaced by a mixed style
that involves a recognition of death, that is, a hybrid style that evokes our
mortality and the mortality of the artist.
Stephen’s remembrance, in which he addresses himself, focuses on his
epiphanies:
I was young . . . Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you
read his F?Oyes, but I prefer Q. Yes, butWis wonderful.Oyes,W. Remember
your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if
you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone
was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico
della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages
of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
(U 3.136–46)
The passage provides stylistically the position Joyce reaches soon after A
Portrait. There is nothing quite like this allusive, parodic, internal dialogue
in either Stephen Hero or Dubliners. The style of A Portrait comes
closer to it, prepares the way for it, but does not fully reach it. The language
reflects on and reinterprets the past. In this self-mocking moment,
Stephen retrospectively places his epiphanies among his grandiose, youthful
projects, as adolescent fantasies. He has turned mystical traditions to ironic
purposes.
With its exaggerated use of the impersonal pronoun, ‘one’, and its evocation
of art’s timeless quality, the passage makes fun of Pater’s essays, in particular
his ‘Pico della Mirandola’.9 This is not the first time Stephen has turned
away from enthusiasms. The turning away is always only partial because an
effect remains. The most obvious example of the pattern is Stephen’s commitment
to the Catholic Church. As many critics have pointed out, his religious
upbringing, including especially his education by the Jesuits, continues to
inform the way he thinks. The mixture of intimate knowledge and scepticism
in the Ulyssean Stephen’s thoughts, his former attraction but present
aversion to the aesthetic reverence that inspired the epiphanies, points to one
of Joyce’s major stylistic achievements. Joyce develops this double temporal
perspective, the perspective of memory, in the works written before Ulysses,
especially in A Portrait and ‘The Dead’. By means of it we can experience
simultaneously both scepticism and the deeply-felt impact of thoughts and
events in the central character’s changing sensibility. Joyce’s inherently double,
or multiple, interiorized style renders the ambivalence and dissonance
of Stephen’s mental life, especially the interplay of self-scrutiny with recollection.
As Joyce complexly presents them, ambivalence, dissonance, and
interplay inform the mental process of creativity. They also embody what
Wilde called ‘the truth of masks’, that is ‘a truth in art’, an insight whose
‘contradictory is also true’.10
Joyce’s early fiction moves from the episodic fragments of Stephen Hero,
through the realistic stories of Dubliners, to the discontinuous narrative and
flamboyant narration of A Portrait. The shift is from either fantasies or seemingly
objective, realistic presentations to recollections or other moments of
mental activity, structured like memories, that mingle the imaginative and the
ostensibly objective in ways that enable a judgement and movement forward.
The mediation announces itself stylistically, often through obscure allusions
and personal references that hinder as well as enhance our understanding;
this style is opaque rather than transparent. Because of the differences from
the earlier narratives, including stylistic ones, the passage from Ulysses gives
us a version of Stephen’s development, through and away from mystical
aestheticism, against which we can gauge the earlier versions. Although his
trajectory is toward allusive mental play and self-mockery, the frame for
Stephen’s sometimes carnivalized thinking in Ulysses and earlier is his situation
as Irish and an artist. He is able, literally at times, to close his eyes to his
surroundings, but the reader recognizes, as Stephen also must, that he faces
pressure from both his Irish friends and the English: Davin and the English
priest and, in Ulysses, Buck Mulligan and the Englishman, Haines.
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